Serbs raped women systematically some as young as 12 and 15
“When they raped me, they screamed, ‘You won’t give birth to little Turks anymore, but to little Cetniks,’ ” she said
By IWPR staff in The Hague, London and Sarajevo (08/01/07)
International justice has come a very long way since the summer of 1992, when violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina raged and reports surfaced for the first time of mass rape being used as a weapon of war. As Bosnian Muslim women flooded into the government-controlled down of Zenica escaping attacks on their villages, accounts emerged of Serb forces engaging in systematic rape, with many of the victims made pregnant.
Fadila Memisevic, a founder of the Zenica Centre for Research on War Crimes and Genocide, remembers the account of just one woman made a delegation from the European parliament go numb. Scars clearly visible on her body, the woman, from a village near Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia, explained that she had been hiding in a basement in order to care for her pregnant daughter-in-law, but was discovered by a group of Serb soldiers. Despite her pleas, they ordered her to strip, and the entire group raped her. To muffle her cries, she bit into her own arm, so that her son, nearby, would not hear what was happening to her.
Her story took two hours to tell, and when she was done the faces of the women from the parliamentary group, which had been tasked to investigate the issue, were white. One was sick. Although they had asked to speak to at least 50 victims, they said they did not want to hear any more accounts. “They talked to only one woman […] [but] there were thousands of women with similar stories,” said Memisevic.
The episode is revealing, as it underscores the delicacy and the difficulty of uncovering this most sensitive of crimes. Initial estimates of 60,000 and more raped women were not substantiated. The parliamentary group’s report settled on an estimate of 20,000 rapes, while recognizing the difficulty of ever achieving precise numbers. But it also marked a turning point, as the role of rape as an explicit tool of war became more widely understood. Shortly afterwards, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, whose research cited a figure of 12,000 victims of sexual violence, concluded that “rape has been used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing.”
The plethora of new war crimes courts have all taken up rape, mounted investigations and in many cases successfully prosecuted cases sexual violence as a war crime. The International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) secured its first conviction for rape in the ground-breaking 2001 Foca verdict, which confirmed the use of rape as a crime against humanity. In the Balkans, after all the international attention, the success of local courts in prosecuting rape cases as war crimes is being questioned, particularly in Bosnia.
Spoils of war
English kings Richard II in the 14th century and Henry V in the 15th both declared rape a capital offence. So did the Leiber Code, the Union Army’s military code during the American Civil War, which also made rape punishable by the death penalty. The Hague conventions at the turn of the century were based on the Leiber Code and emphasized that rules forbidding rape applied as much during times of war and occupation as during peace. Germany’s “rape of Belgium” in the WW I remains a controversial period for the extreme claims of barbarity, but the metaphor tends only to mask widespread incidences of actual rape. The 1929 Geneva Convention proclaimed that “women shall be treated with all consideration due their sex” - intending to prevent rape but with the awkwardness of a euphemism.During the WW II, many French women along with concentration camp inmates fell victim. And Red Army soldiers raped many thousands of women during the liberation of Berlin in 1945. After the war, the 1949 Geneva Convention spelled out more clearly than its predecessor that “women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honor, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution or any form of indecent assault.”
According to Human Rights Watch, the verdict was the first time an international court had punished sexual violence in a civil war; and the first time that rape was found to be an act of genocide when it was committed with the intent to destroy a particular group targeted as such.
In Bosnia, Serbs also raped women systematically. Memisevic says she alone has interviewed or received statements from around 10,000 female rape victims.
“Sometimes I would receive about 20 letters a day from Germany, from Bosnian women who live there as refugees and who have been raped,” she said. “They simply had the need to tell someone about what happened to them. Sometimes a woman would write to me begging me never to tell anyone the things she told me, because her husband was taken away, but she still hoped he would come back.”
Bakira Hasecic was raped in 1992 in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad, infamous for its Vilina Vlas spa hotel - a rape camp from which few victims ever returned.
“When they raped me, they screamed, ‘You won’t give birth to little Turks anymore, but to little Cetniks,’ ” she said, using Serb extremists terms for Muslims and Serbs. “Such hatred has been passed on by every generation since the time of the Turkish conquest here. That was the motive and the cause of all of this. Because I’m not a Serb, but a Muslim, a Bosniak woman, that was my guilt.”
But it was for prosecuting sexual crimes in Foca that the Yugoslav tribunal made history in February 2001. Tribunal judges found three Bosnian Serb men guilty of raping Bosnian Muslim women - some as young as 12 and 15. They were also accused of selling or renting women and girls for forced prostitution to other soldiers. The U.N. force in Bosnia, General MacKenzie, consistently blamed all sides for the carnage, but never explicitly named the Serbs. However, his espoused opinions to Congress, the media and think tanks, (like Heritage) must be viewed with skepticism since he disingenuously never mentioned SerbNet, a Serbian lobbying firm, paid him.
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